CMLT

This course explores portrayals of human difference in literature, travel writing, painting, and autobiography from Spain, England, and the Americas. Students will become versed in debates surrounding the emergence of human distinctions based on religion, race, and ethnicity in the early modern era. Understanding these debates and the history surrounding them is crucial to participating in informed discussion, research, and activism regarding issues of race, empire, and colonialism across time and space.

This course explores modern and contemporary feminism through a transatlantic lens. We will consider three major moments and sites of a multi-centered conversation. First, we will explore the modernist desire for cosmopolitanism which drew writers across the Atlantic (Simone de Beauvoir’s adventures in the US; Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein’s lives in Paris). In the central part of the quarter, we will focus on the period between 1960 and 1990 which witnessed intense conversation and contestation between a French paradigm of “écriture féminine” (Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig), and the rivalling practices and theories in America (from Adrienne Rich and Mary Daly to Judith Butler). Finally, we will explore the ways in which feminist thought has endeavored to account for race, class, rurality, and disability (from Maryse Condé to Aurélie Olivier and Roseline Lambert). The course will explore various media (novels, poetry, theater and performance, film), and various ways to engage critically and creatively with this history of transatlantic feminism.

“History” is skewed and incomplete. It leaves out as much as it reveals. As they relegate past suffering to oblivion, historical omissions perpetuate the violence that they seek to hide. And this violence is often felt on multiple levels by women of color who find themselves imbricated within (neo)colonial, patriarchal, heteronormative, classist and ableist societal structures. In this course, we will situate ourselves at the intersection of literature, history and gender studies. We will explore the following questions together: Faced with the blind spots of history, how can literature function as an alternative archive that draws attention to the invisibilized stories of women of color? Simultaneously, how does literature sensitize us to the impossibility of fully knowing the past, no matter how hard we try? Course material may include theoretical texts, fiction, poetry, songs, podcasts, film, graphic novels and social media material. Potential examples include Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King (2022), Gaiutra Bahadur’s Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (2013), Nathacha Appanah’s La Mémoire Délavée (2023), Lia Brozgal’s Absent the Archive: Cultural Traces of a Massacre in Paris, 17 October 1961 (2022), Marie Clements’ Bones of Crows (2022), and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s poetry. 

Taught in English. All course material will be available in English, though students are encouraged to engage with original materials. Work may be submitted in English, French or Spanish.

According to Fijian-Tongan writer Epeli Hau‘ofa, “There is a world of difference between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” In this course, we will delve into the “world of difference” that exists between viewing islands as remote and insignificant, and considering them as crucial nodes in an ever-expanding planetary network. Simultaneously, we will consider the stakes of moving away from traditional representations of the ocean as a blank canvas for human movement, to instead consider it as a vibrant material and multispecies space. This course will encourage students to formulate their own approaches to cutting-edge debates in archipelagic theory and critical ocean studies, and to situate those debates within the broader fields of environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. Readings will be drawn from the Pacific Ocean, the Atlantic Ocean (including the Caribbean Sea), and the Indian Ocean.

Madame de La Fayette’s 1678 novel represents a turning point in the international development of the psychological novel and historical fiction. Set in a Renaissance past of courtly international intrigue, the novel plumbs its characters’ interiorized struggles with erotic desire, marriage, and adultery, forging a path for later novelists such as Flaubert, George Eliot, and Tolstoy. We will examine debates about its literary form and moral impact, as well as around gender and women’s writing, placing the novel in a transnational context (Spanish, Italian, and English romances, drama, and moral philosophy) and its later reception, including film adaptations and its role in heated contemporary controversies around the place of the humanities in society. Students are encouraged to undertake individual comparative research projects in relation to the novel. Course taught in English but reading ability in French required.

Does constraint foster creativity? Can wordplay carry political meaning? Is formal innovation divorced from lyrical expression? How do experimental literary movements respond to their sociopolitical moments and local contexts, and how do they transform when they travel across geographical and linguistic borders? We will consider these questions via the work of the longest-lived French literary group, the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or Workshop for Potential Literature), examining its origins as a quasi-secret society in 1960 and its expansion into an internationally visible and multilingual collective (with members from Italy, Spain, Argentina, and the US). We will investigate debates about inspiration and authorship, copying and plagiarism, collective creation, multilingualism, constraint and translation, and the viability of the lyric subject. While considering antecedents (Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Roussel), our readings will explore several generations of Oulipians (Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Michèle Métail, Anne Garréta, Frédéric Forte), and conclude with some very contemporary Oulipo-inspired writing from around the world (Christian Bök, Urayoán Noel, Mónica de la Torre, K. Silem Mohammed). Alongside critical essays, students will carry out short experiments with constraint and procedure, as well as translation exercises; and they will have the opportunity for dialogue with acclaimed writers and scholars who will visit our seminar.

Taking the astonishing fiction of Andrei Platonov (1899-1951) as a starting point this course asks: how have realist fictions in general and socialist realism in particular been used to transform material and ideological realities? Can realism be revolutionary? Can it be dictated by the state? Grounded in historical context, our reading will venture into the afterlife and future of socialist realism. As philosophers across the world reinterpreted Platonov and other Soviet and socialist authors, what appeared to be gaps in intellectual and literary history now seem to be continuities of influence across borders. Reading Shklovsky, Lukács, Jameson, Timofeeva, Malabou and others, this course traces the new and transnational socialist realism. Topics include ideology, gender, community, colonialism and decolonization.

This course examines Hemispheric Studies approaches to the literatures and cultures of the Americas, which combines a commitment to comparatism with attention to the specificities of local contexts ranging from the Southern Cone to the Caribbean to North America. Theories drawn from American Studies, Canadian Studies, Caribbean Studies, Latin American Studies, Poetry and Poetics, Postcolonial Studies, and U.S. Latinx Studies will be explored in relation to literature written primarily but not exclusively in the 20th and 21st centuries by writers residing throughout the Americas. We’ll examine recent, innovative studies being published by contemporary scholars working with Hemispheric methods across several fields. We’ll also consider the politics of academic field formation, debating the theories and uses of a method that takes the American hemisphere as its primary frame yet does not take the U.S. as the default point of departure; and the conceptual and political limitations of such an approach. No knowledge of Spanish, French, or Portuguese is required. (20th/21st)

This course investigates the shifting relations between Hebrew/Israeli literature and culture and Zionism as a political project, ideology, myth, and power structure. We will investigate multiple forms of cultural articulation, from built environment, to popular culture, to culture as a set of practices that govern everyday life, while devoting special attention to poetry – an institution valorized by classical secularist Zionism yet one often seen as standing in tension with Zionism’s contemporary religious-nationalist forms. What role has Hebrew culture played within the Zionist project, as bearer, expression, reflection, or refraction of nationalist ideology or myth? What are the relationships between culture’s putative forms of autonomy and forms of dissent, resistance, or alternative political vision in Israel and Palestine? How might this connect to Mizrachi and other ‘minority’ identities, and the roles of Palestinians as cultural producers within Israeli frames? What is to be learned about secular nationalism, Jewish secularism, post-secularism, religiosity, and political theology particularly in an era of what seems to be the rising hegemony of expressly religious Zionism.

This course offers space to consider in-depth one of the most fundamental, yet tricky aspects of stories: the imagined person, or fictional character. Some of the questions we will ask and try to answer together include: how do characters “work”—what makes successful characterization? How do authors depict characters changing over time yet remaining recognizably who they are? How are characters shaped not only by events in a plot but by the other characters that they interact with? We will investigate these questions across a range of textual genres and media, with a few major themes as our focus: the stability of characters across time or multiple texts (from figures in legend to Sherlock Holmes); character as moral progression or formation; and character relationality. We’ll consider the question of “relatability” and why it might (or might not!) matter and examine characters’ hierarchical relationships within the plot (e.g., major vs. minor characters, protagonist and sidekick, etc.) and how these intersect with the social hierarchies of these character’ worlds. By taking one key aspect of narrative and thinking about it together in sustained, serious, and playful ways, our goal will be to gain a greater understanding and appreciation of how stories meditate on personhood in all its complexity.